The Best Saturday Night Live Sketches from Season 45

Saturday Night Live’s 45th season came to an end in a most unusual way, with a run of “at home” episodes where cast members shot their own footage at home. Those three quarantine editions weren’t any more consistent than the show usually is, but they were weirder and more inspired, and making them some of the brightest highlights of the season.
Of course the traditional episodes that ran into March had their fair share of worthwhile sketches, too, especially the episodes hosted by Eddie Murphy and John Mulaney. If you ignore the expected weak spots of the show—the political cold open and Weekend Update’s news jokes—this was the closest thing SNL has had to a legitimately good season in years. And these sketches—which aren’t ranked or in any specific order—were a huge reason why. Here are our favorite sketches from SNL’s 45th season.
“Grocery Store Day”
The best sketch of the second at home episode came, again, from Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon. They did another variation on their duo of well-meaning but incompetent women in a grocery store ad marketing all the stuff that isn’t selling during the quarantine. “Grocery Store Ad” marries the genial oddness they bring to their Smokery Farms characters to a timely premise that pretty much everybody will feel acutely during these weird times. McKinnon can be a little too confident a performer at times—her Ruth Bader Ginsberg character is an ostentatious bust at this point—but working with Bryant brings out the best in both of them.
“Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles”
Here’s something that hits a little too close to home: during one of Saturday Night Live’s quarantine episodes, we got a glimpse at how life has turned out for Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael in the animated short “Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles.” And no, it ain’t pretty. I have a job. My wife seemingly still loves me. I don’t have kids. I basically feel the same way I did at 20, despite the gray hair and extra pounds. Still, I feel this way too much. Despite my (still relatively successful) attempts to retain my youth, I recognize this struggle from my friends, my siblings, and even myself, when I’m at my most honest. This is the natural course of life, even if you’re a turtle mutated into a ninja vigilante by radioactive sludge. You can’t beat up time, no matter how many nunchucks you swing at it.
“Zoom Call”
The best piece of the first “at home” episode was a return sketch that swapped out one piece of office software for a newer one that’s become a daily requirement for so many working from home. One of last season’s best sketches starred Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon as two middle-aged receptionists utterly failing to understand PowerPoint during a corporate meeting. The absurdity of their presentation—and their own increasing shame and panic—was a new highwater point for the already fruitful Bryant/McKinnon tandem. They brought that concept back in this episode, but in the context of a Zoom meeting. Once again Bryant and McKinnon’s characters were completely inept at the most basic concepts behind Zoom, the internet, and computers, resulting in a series of progressively ridiculous reactions from the two.
“Uncle Meme”
John Mulaney hosted SNL again in February, and although it wasn’t quite as strong as his first two episodes, it was still easily one of the best of the season. I could’ve picked from a handful of different sketches for this list—the Sound of Music parody is particularly funny—but went with “Uncle Meme” because, well, sketches about very contemporary modes of communication will always feel a little bit more timely than sketches making fun of movies from 55 years ago. Mulaney again expertly deploys his inherent white, uptight squareness as the butt of an embarrassing meme started by his nephew, and Chris Redd gets a couple of great lines in, too.